Many business enterprises maintain a central data storage location whereat the bulk of the organization's business data is stored. The enterprise's business data is continuously updated by numerous employees at remote "terminals", each of which has access privileges to the central data storage unit. This known data storage model provides a central, continuously updated store of data that reflects the current state of the entire business enterprise.
The requirements for data storage and update vary widely depending on the business enterprise. For example, at one extreme, the news industry requires very flexible means of collecting data of varied and unknown format from each remote "news" site. At the other extreme, the retail store industry requires automated collection of very specific data from each remote "retail" site. However, the typical business enterprise, such as a managed care organization (MCO), collects information which is generally standardized so that the required data may be listed on some sort of questionnaire, but which may also be varied enough to require selective gathering and interpretation of the data by a human agent/surveyor.
The managed care industry requires the continuous collection and storage of data regarding the various individuals and institutions responsible for providing medical care. This data is used to ensure that the medical care providers are adhering to the standards for quality set by the managed care organization. The types of data collected can vary from organization to organization, but typically a large proportion of the data requires specific observations of the medical care provider and its practices and, therefore, must be collected at the actual location where medical care is provided. This task is usually accomplished by an agent of the managed care organization who completes a set of questions on-site and delivers the completed survey back to the MCO. The responses to the questionnaire are then processed, tabulated and reviewed by the MCO for internal purposes.
The prior art process of data acquisition from remote medical care providers can be divided into five main steps. The MCO first creates a standard questionnaire relating to the medical care provider. The MCO delivers the questionnaire to its agent/surveyor by hand-delivery, mail, or courier. The agent/surveyor completes the questionnaire at the remote medical care site such as a doctor's office or hospital. The agent/surveyor returns the completed survey to the MCO by hand-delivery, mail or courier. Finally, the MCO processes the survey by, among other things, entering the data contained in the survey into a central computer. As used herein, the term "questionnaire" refers to a set of questions and possible responses which must be filled out by a data collection agent/surveyor. As used herein, the term "survey" refers to a "questionnaire" together with the data entered by the data collection agent/surveyor.
The typical MCO uses a paper-based survey to collect information. The questions, responses, and instructions are typed on sheets of paper which must be physically transported to and from the remote medical care site. This process, as currently and widely implemented, has the inherent inefficiency that the time spent in the transmittal of information (to and from the remote medical care site) is significantly longer than the time required to collect the data from the remote medical care site. The prior art system and method also has the inherent inefficiency of duplicitive data entry and the concomitant problem of data entry error. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system and method of collecting data from a remote medical care site wherein the data is electronically input only once at the site by a site agent/surveyor, and then electronically transferred back to the central data storage unit of the MCO.
The invention improves upon the current process of remote data collection in several ways. The method and system of the present invention eliminate the overhead associated with the production, processing, and storage of large amounts of paperwork that are required by the present process of remote data collection. The system and method also drasticly reduce the time necessary for transmitting information from the remote site to the central collecting organization, thereby reducing the time elapsed between the demand for information and the availability of the information. The system and method of the present invention also reduces the random error and costs associated with redundant data entry and hand-scoring techniques.